Myth as Meth

by rsbakker

What is the lesson that Tolkien teaches us with Middle-earth? The grand moral, I think, is that the illusion of a world can be so easily cued. Tolkien reveals that meaning is cheap, easy to conjure, easy to believe, so long as we sit in our assigned seats. This is the way, at least, I thematically approach my own world-building. Like a form of cave-painting.

The idea here is to look at culture as a meaning machine, where ‘meaning’ is understood not as content, but in a post-intentional sense: various static and dynamic systems cuing various ‘folk’ forms of human cognition. Think of the wonder of the ‘artists’ in Chauvet, the amazement of discovering how to cue the cognition of worlds upon walls using only charcoal. Imagine that first hand, that first brain, tracking that reflex within itself, simply drawing a blacked finger down the wall.

Traditional accounts, of course, would emphasize the symbolic orrepresentational significance of events such as Chauvet, thereby dragging the question of the genesis of human culture into the realm of endless philosophical disputation. On a post-intentional view, however, what Chauvet vividly demonstrates is how human cognition can be easily triggered out of school. Human cognition is so heuristic, in fact, that it has little difficulty simulating those cues once they have been discovered. Since human cognition also turns out to be wildly opportunistic, the endless socio-practical gerrymandering characterizing culture was all but inevitable. Where traditional views of the ‘human revolution’ focus on utterly mysterious modes of symbolic transmission and elaboration, the present account focuses on the processes of cue isolation and cognitive adaptation. What are isolated are material/behavioural means of simulating cues belonging to ancestral forms of cognition. What is adapted is the cognitive system so cued: the cave paintings at Chauvet amount to a socio-cognitive adaptation of visual cognition, a way to use visual cognitive cues ‘out of school’ to attenuate behaviour. Though meaning, understood intentionally, remains an important explanandum in this approach, ‘meaning’ understood post-intentionally simply refers to the isolation and adaptation of cue-based cognitive systems to achieve some systematic behavioural effect. The basic processes involved are no more mysterious than those underwriting camouflage in nature.*

A post-intentional theory of meaning focuses on the continuity of semantic practices and nature, and views any theoretical perspective entailing the discontinuity of those practices and nature as spurious artifacts of the application of heuristic modes of cognition to theoretical issues. A post-intentional theory of meaning, in other worlds, views culture as a natural phenomenon, and not some arcane artifact of something empirically inexplicable. Signification is wholly material on this account, with all the messiness that comes with it.

Cognitive systems optimize effectiveness by reaching out only as far into nature as they need to. If they can solve distal systems via proximal signals possessing reliable systematic relationships to those systems, they will do so. Humans, like all other species possessing nervous systems, are shallow information consumers in what might be called deep information environments.

Given the limits of human cognition, our ancestors could report whatever they wanted about the greater world (their deep information environments), so long as those reports came cheap and/or discharged some kind of implicit function. They enjoyed what might be called, deep discursive impunity.

Consider anthropomorphism, the reflexive application of radically heuristic socio-cognitive capacities dedicated to solving our fellow humans to nonhuman species and nature more generally. When we run afoul anthropomorphism we ‘misattribute’ folk posits adapted to human problem-solving to nonhuman processes. As misapplications, anthropomorphisms tell us nothing about the systems they take as their putative targets. One does not solve a drought by making offerings to gods of rain. This is what makes anthropomorphic worldviews ‘fantastic’: the fact that they tell us very little, if anything, about the very nature they purport to describe and explain.

Now this, on the face of things, should prove maladaptive, since it amounts to squandering tremendous resources and behaviour effecting solutions to problems that do not exist. But of course, as is the case with so much human behaviour, it likely possesses ulterior functions serving the interests of individuals in ways utterly inaccessible to those individuals, at least in ancestral contexts.

The cognitive sophistication required to solve those deep information environments effectively rendered them inscrutable, impenetrable black-boxes, short the development of science. What we painted across the sides those boxes, then, could only be fixed by our basic cognitive capacities and by whatever ulterior function they happened to discharge. Given the limits of human cognition, our ancestors could report whatever they wanted about the greater world (their deep information environments), so long as those reports came cheap and/or discharged some kind of implicit function. They enjoyed what might be called, deep discursive impunity. All they would need is a capacity to identify cues belonging to social cognition in the natural world—to see, for instance, retribution, in the random walk of weather—and the ulterior exploitation of anthropomorphism could get underway.

Given the ancestral inaccessibility of deep information, and given the evolutionary advantages of social coordination and cohesion, particularly in the context of violent intergroup competition, it becomes easy to see how the quasi-cognition of an otherwise impenetrable nature could become a resource. When veridicality has no impact one way or another, social and individual facilitation alone determines the selection of the mechanisms responsible. When anything can be believed, to revert to folk idioms, then only those beliefs that deliver matter. This, then, explains why different folk accounts of the greater world possess deep structural similarities despite their wild diversity. Their reliance on socio-cognitive systems assures deep commonalities in form, as do the common ulterior functions provided. The insolubility of the systems targeted, on the other hand, assures any answer meeting the above constraints will be as effective as any other.

Given the evolutionary provenance of this situation, we are now in a position to see how accurate deep information can be seen as a form of cognitive pollution, something alien that disrupts and degrades ancestrally stable, shallow information ecologies. Strangely enough, what allowed our ancestors to report the nature of nature was the out-and-out inscrutability of nature, the absence of any (deep) information to the contrary—and the discursive impunity this provides. Anthropomorphic quasi-cognition requires deep information neglect. The greater our scientifically mediated sensitivity to deep information becomes, the less tenable anthropomorphic quasi-cognition becomes, the more fantastic folk worlds become. The worlds arising out of our evolutionary heritage find themselves relegated to fairy tales.

Fantasy worlds, then, can be seen as an ontological analogue to the cave paintings at Chauvet. They cue ancestral modes of cognition, simulating the kinds of worlds our ancestors reflexively reported, folk worlds rife with those posits they used to successfully solve one another in a wide variety of practical contexts, meaningful worlds possessing the kinds of anthropomorphic ontologies we find in myths and religions.

With the collapse of the cognitive ecology that made these worlds possible, comes the ineffectiveness of the tools our ancestors used to navigate them. We now find ourselves in deep information worlds, environments not only rife with information our ancestors had neglected, but also crammed with environments engineered to manipulate shallow information cues. We now find ourselves in a world overrun with crash spaces, regions where our ancestral tools consistently fail, and cheat spaces, regions where they are exploited for commercial gain.

This is a rather remarkable fact, even if it becomes entirely obvious upon reflection. Humans possess ideal cognitive ecologies, solve spaces, environments rewarding their capacities, just as humans possess crash spaces, environments punishing their capacities. This is the sense in which fantasy worlds can be seen as a compensatory mechanism, a kind of cognitive eco-preserve, a way to inhabit more effortless shallow information worlds, pseudo-solution spaces, hypothetical environments serving up largely unambiguous cues to generally reliable cognitive capacities. And like biological eco-preserves, perhaps they serve an important function. As we saw with anthropomorphism above, pseudo-solution spaces can be solvers (as opposed to crashers) in their own respect—culture is nothing if not a testimony to this.

Fantasy is zombie scripture, the place where our ancient assumptions lurch in the semblance of life. The fantasy writer is the voodoo magician, imbuing dead meaning with fictional presence.

But fantasy worlds are also the playground of blind brains. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we learn how to cue different cognitive capacities out of school—how to cheat ourselves for good or ill. Our shallow information nature is presently the focus of a vast, industrial research program, one gradually providing the information, techniques, and technology required to utterly pre-empt our ancestral ecologies, which is to say, to perfectly simulate ‘reality.’ The reprieve from the cognitive pollution of actual environments itself potentially amounts to more cognitive pollution. We are, in some respect at least, a migratoryspecies, one prone to gravitate toward greener pastures. Is the migration between realities any less inevitable than the migration across lands?

Via the direct and indirect deformation of existing socio-cognitive ecologies, deep information both drives the demand for and enables the high-dimensional cuing of fantastic cognition. In our day and age, a hunger for meaning is at once a predisposition to seek the fantastic. We should expect that hunger to explode with the pace of technological change. For all the Big Data ballyhoo, it pays to remember that we are bound up in an auto-adaptive macro-social system that is premised upon solving us, mastering our cognitive reflexes in ways invisible or that please. We are presently living through the age where it succeeds.

Fantasy is zombie scripture, the place where our ancient assumptions lurch in the semblance of life. The fantasy writer is the voodoo magician, imbuing dead meaning with fictional presence. This resurrection can either facilitate our relation to the actual world, or it can pre-empt it. Science and technology are the problem here. The mastery of deep information environments enables ever greater degrees of shallow information capture. As our zombie natures are better understood, the more effectively our reward systems are tuned, the deeper our descent into this or that variety of fantasy becomes. This is the dystopic image of Akratic society, a civilization ever more divided between deep and shallow information consumers, between those managing the mechanisms, and those captured in some kind of semantic cheat space.

45 Comments to “Myth as Meth”

I have argued in comments to some of your other posts that philosophy of mind is fundamentally religious in nature. You seemed to be coming around to this view in your Birds of a Feather post. Would you now say that intentional philosophy and religion are both “folk accounts of the greater world” and “possess deep structural similarities” to each other?

On a related issue, I don’t know if a man who makes his living writing fantasy should describe fantasy novels in ways that make them seem like a con job, especially if they are a con job. But again based on this argument Kellhus can be seen as a fantasy novelist. And we can be seen as Saubon, finally understanding as damnation claims him. On this analogy the deepening information environments in which we find ourselves are a kind of hell.

This has been my position for a long time now, I guess, depending on how you characterize ‘fundamentally religious.’ The more accurate thing to say, I think, is that both intentional philosophy and religion turn on similar kinds of cognitive illusions.

It’s videogames I’m primarily aiming at as the potential social problem here. But all art is a con job from a cognitive perspective! This is partly why art theory is generally so antagonistic to cognitivism. What I would argue is that my approach allows us to clearly delineate the way art is cognitive apart from supernaturalism. Using tools out-of-school is a great way to devise new schools, as well as new tools…

I don’t understand how ‘cognitive eco-preserves’ are being described – they aren’t so much preserves as, in their original ‘intention’, survival procedures. Aesop’s fables are even more explicitly survival procedures, for example (ignoring for now whether they are effective – it’s a procedure that attempts survival that matters). As you said in an interview, IIRC, people who don’t pay attention to horrible stories often come to horrible ends.

The logistics of the average persons food and shelter relies on massively complicated distribution chains and economics – ie, no one knows how to survive, by their own actual merit, anymore. Is calling it a ‘cognitive eco-preserve’ a symptom of that ‘f’ knows how to live?’ shrug? It goes from survival procedure to some kind of zoo?

A ‘preserve’? That’s kind of weird. Certainly it might be where the mind ‘rests’, instead of finding more beds of nails. Certainly a system which uses cheat spaces to leave workers in ‘rest’ spots might at some point, from the workers view, seem that what the system threatens is such a ‘rest’ place. Rather than the system merely going to take away what it generated in the first place. That’d explain the sense it’s a preserve rather than a procedure. Or am I being mean to suggest the idea? :p

Because why would evolution ‘care’ about having such a place? What benefit is ‘ancestral systems can function in ancestral ways’ to survival of the fittest? How does ‘the way you instinctually want to do it is how it(s depicted to) work’ matter in terms of raw contact with evolution? Surely a ‘preserve’ seems out of sync with Darwinism? Ancestors don’t matter to survival now.

That’s why ‘preserve’ seems a ‘conditioned’ term to me and as much I’m wondering why it’s being used? It sounds a placation – perhaps like the cells of our bodies are placated by a greater system in order they give their efforts to that greater system (and of course during that some of those placated cells get sheered off and killed). Perhaps my star sign should have been cancer, lol!

Nothing cares at all, strictly speaking. Are you saying you don’t think there’s such places as ‘preserves’? I still don’t get it, and I certainly don’t understand how preserves are inconsistent with Darwinism!

Yes, I would say there aren’t places that are ‘preserves’ – as I estimate it it’s ‘survival procedures’ that have had their adaption efforts put into hibernation mode.

How are ‘preserves’ consistent with Darwinism to begin with? I’m not seeing the survival pay off of it? From here it looks like it would make the individual less likely to survive. I’ve described an ulterior function, but mine is about a larger organism/hives survival. One where the individual is as disposable as a few cells here or there in our own body are disposable.

Yeah, I feel a bit of ‘claim judo’ has happened here – as if I’m the one to have made a claim (that of inconsistancy ) and I have to support my claim. Rather than you’ve made a claim of consistancy with Darwinism to begin with that needs to be supported. The claimant role is judo flipped around in a way that hides the original claim. And so preserves that claim from being debunked by framing all debunking efforts as themselves being the only claim occurring.

It’s not intellectually honest, man! If the assessment were accurate, look to your responce (or lack there of) for why people give up attempting to debunk others claims. Ie, that accuracy will seem nill and so credibility will seem nill. Ie, it’ll just seem obnoxious of me.

What part isn’t understandable? People will say that when there’s plenty of the criticism that is straight forward and understandable (even banal), rejecting the entirety for simply missing part. At what spot did understanding fail, exactly?

Short form – Why would evolution result in a ‘cognitive eco-preserve’ function when it could result in something far simpler, far more slap dash and directly linked to survival dividends? Wouldn’t Occam’s razor suggest something simpler than a preserve function would be the more likely answer? Or does a preserve function genuinely seem the simplest answer?

Maybe somehow it is – but to me it seems unlikely for its apparent complexity, as much as a zoo is a preserve but is more complex than a wilderness. I’d like it if fantasy were a cognitive eco-preserve – I’d prefer to be wrong. It genuinely sounds really nice.

I suppose you could say fantasy is pretend religion, the way football is pretend war. The emotional bonds that form among the players on a team are real, because football actually is violent and dangerous. The emotional bonds among the fans, and between the fans and the team are fake, or at least taken out of school. The capacity for emotional bonding that makes it possible for a group of men to kill a mastodon or another group of men with pointed wooden sticks is co-opted by sports. The illusion of belonging is used to sell ten three dollars worth of T-shirt for seventy-five dollars. (I would never go to a Bears game without an official team jersey. My Richard Dent cost me $150.00.)

Well I like to say that it’s ‘scripture otherwise,’ but I would shy from calling it ‘pretend religion’ simply because I see dogmatic commitment as essential to any useful definition of religion. It is the very antithesis of religion, a glaring cultural symptom of its credibility crisis, which is likely why Harry Potter books were being burned not so long ago. Build a world that structurally resembles Biblical Israel and you will be called a fantasy writer.

Ironically that’s probably what drives sales of fantasy books, is that as soon as you finish reading its so obviously a fiction that pop, the dogma is gone. So they want the next book in order to re-enter. Or maybe that’s being cynical.

Anyway, my point is that evolution wouldn’t care about an individual having some sense of something working the way you instinctual want it to work. Evolution doesn’t care about you having a ‘preserve’. It’s always new with evolution – ‘measure is without end’.

Of course when the ‘individual’ is integrated as part of a larger organism, that rule changes. When you bruise yourself, thousands of cells die. But that’s not important as the larger organism lives on. And yet those cells must be placated or they wont be there in the first place in order to die. ‘preserve’ just seems word coming from such placation. That’s my edgey shit for the day.

I was perplexed when I first read your response, but it occurred to me that you might be looking at it from the view of a writer where I look at it from the view of a reader. The people running the seance know it’s a con and they know exactly how to work the con so it’s convincing. As for us marks, we really think grandpa is telling us he loves us from beyond the grave, at least until we get back out into the daylight.

In the Wheel of Time books the energy that drives the universe and makes magic possible is gendered. Maleness and Femaleness are fundamental in that universe the way the strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational forces are in this one. As the outrage over which bathrooms transgendered people should use indicates, some people still think Maleness and Femaleness are fundamental in this universe as well. We already have enough knowledge to know that gender isn’t much more fundamental than eye color but our ancestors thought it was fundamental. Robert Jordan lets his readers spend a few hours in a world that validates the old beliefs about gender.

I think this over values the role of narratives (grand and otherwise) in human-being, better to look (as say Tonya Lurhmann does with religion or Alva Noe with art/object appreciation) at this along the lines of extended-minding, a new form if you will of enactivist object-relations.http://www.luhrmann.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/metakinesisfinal.pdf

this links back up with the account of the closest thing the closest thing to general cognition being the capacity to cue cognitions (heuristics) out of evolved contexts through stagings (see the semiotics and disney articles for example).

General cuing is something I can get on board with (this is my position): the cognition will always be a matter of ‘it depends’–heuristic. We can tackle any problem, and sometimes we succeed. You don’t need general cognition to be generalist, just tenacity (stupidity) and time. I just don’t know what ‘extended minding’ could amount to apart from making a bad ontologization worse. Get rid of the mind, you get rid of the problem altogether, and you can get to the real work of picking apart all the systems involved.

This is the big techno-social upshot of cuing: it is so astoundingly easy to do, be it with language or shapes or charcoal. We are built to be cheaply sealed in. One way of looking at it is as an accelerating process of stimuli swapping (with vast commercial entities vying, in real time no less, for swappable bandwidth).

i see that potential (http://www.wnyc.org/story/big-data-threat-democracy/) but to me this is a clear sign that we haven’t had anything like this before in history because we lacked this kind of reach/instrument-ality so not like various religious activities and all, ie you couldn’t base a city/state on the bible or the like because there isn’t enough in the way of instruction/data just as cities aren’t organisms and aren’t smart without vast (and so far largely speculative) engineering/infrastructure efforts/investments.
big data/computing should be the cutting-edge of arguments against structuralisms but doesn’t seem to connect with folks. Sadly as the lady-quant explains in the linked interview we don’t have anything like the needed feedback loops that would make for better informed engineering so we just have people amping up their all too familiar prejudices and this turns out to be enough (not so unlike fossil-fuel power) to be more than destructive enough, hell just look at what the folks who learned to better engineer fast foods have done in terms of our national healthcare costs for food/diet related illnesses like diabetes/heart-disease/etc, it’s the old tyranny of the means on cyber-steroids.

The question how far a cue can be altered before ceasing to trigger some cognitive mode is an interesting and thoroughly empirical one. For me, though, the point of emphasis is always on the ancestral/historical correlations responsible for fixing the cue in the first place. We see horses in Chauvet despite the granularity of the cues and the absence of any horses in our vicinity. So the cuing information, patterns of retinal excitations, conforms with the patterns our ancestors encountered, but the correlative context, what once made those patterns effective means of tracking physical environments, is being completely transformed.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s the conjuring that’s the issue. What I think is the issue is that people look to stories for ways of surviving or gaining prosperity. But it’s this instinct to look for ways to prosper that is how certain individuals get rich by exploiting that instinct. It’s like blogs that make money (via advertising to large amounts of traffic) by talking about how much money they make (but not the self referential fact of it). It doesn’t help when authors are seen to do well by the profits of sales – that just gives the story even more aura of ‘this is how you prosper’. As if there is some merit to the story since it made sales. Rather than the merit being in exploiting the instinct to find out ways of prospering.

Instead of using language to say where the good fruit is (to use Pratchett’s description), it’s using language to lie about good fruit existing and it is that lie that is where the good fruit/money now is. It’s not how easy it is to conjure worlds that is the problem. It’s that the conjurers have no interest in talking about where the good fruit is, their actual good fruit is to trigger the sense in readers that they are finding out means to prosperity. The authors prosperity has nothing to do with the prosperity they talk about.

It’s in music as well. Every upbeat song from a singer who is upbeat because of all the money they made from selling songs telling people things are upbeat. The singers happiness comes from something entirely different from the happiness they sing about. But hey, singers don’t think about what makes them happy, they just think about what goes into a song. And songs sell. And they take the money from the sales and have a great party, being happy and live off of it, etc etc.

Granted if it seems readers just read because…no reason in particular (no reason beyond simply gravitating to conjured worlds), then I guess it just seems a matter of what you put in, like it’s a bag or something. And the bags sell and one makes a living off it, etc etc.

But there’s this grating sense of not achieving something material, I’m sure.

sure but interesting to see this stuff making its way into pop culture, who knows yers may turn out to be timely meditations. the real threat of course is that AI doesn’t turn out to make any significant differences (just gives us more of the same) and we keep on down our present roads to self-destruction…

As observers, we are forever doomed to see only a piece of the larger puzzle of which we are a part. And that, it turns out, could be our saving grace. When the universe splits in two, the zero on the right-hand side of the equation takes on a new value. Things change. Physics happens. Time begins to flow. You might even say the universe is born.

If that sounds like retrocausation (the future causing events in the past)—well, it is. Quantum theory requires this strange reversal of time’s arrow. Wheeler emphasized this fact with his famous delayed choice experiment, which he first posed as a thought experiment but that was later demonstrated successfully in the lab. In the delayed choice, an observer’s measurement in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past—a past that can stretch back for millions, even 13.8 billions, of years. The causal chain turns in on itself, its end links back to its beginning: James’s bridge is a loop.

Maybe another way of looking at Koringhus’ dilemma. (insert smiley emoji here.)